Google Gives Apps Admins Scheduled Upgrade Tracks

Google March 15 moved to improve its Google Apps upgrade
deliveries, adding a rapid release and scheduled release tracks to help IT
administrators prepare for application upgrades.

Google hosts Google Apps, including Google Docs, Gmail
and other collaboration applications on its cloud computing infrastructure.
Google's practice has been to automatically provision upgrades for those apps
to customers.

While this approach saves IT managers the time and costs
of performing software upgrades and managing installers, some companies want to
better plan for new features.

"We're always excited to bring you the newest
features as soon as they're ready, but we've heard from some customers with
complex IT environments that they'd like more notice before new features are
deployed to their users," said Anna Mongayt, from Google's Enterprise
Operations.

Google's new feature release process lets Google Apps admins
have more control over when new features are provisioned to their companies'
Google Apps installations.

Admins may choose the Rapid Release track to have access
to new features as soon as the features have completed testing and quality
assurance. Alternatively, Apps admins may select the Scheduled Release, which
provisions new features on a regular, weekly release schedule following the
initial release of those features.